Law And Ethics For Today S Journalist

Law and Ethics for Today's Journalist offers aspiring and working journalists the practical understanding of law and ethics they must have to succeed at their craft. Instead of covering every nuance of media law for diverse communications majors, Mathewson focuses exclusively on what's relevant for journalists. Even though media law and media ethics are closely linked together in daily journalistic practice, they are usually covered in separate volumes. Mathewson brings them together in a clear and colourful way that practicing journalists will find more useful. Everything a journalist needs to know about legal protections, limitations, and risks inherent in workaday reporting is illustrated with highlights from major court opinions. Mathewson advises journalists who must often make ethical decisions on the spot with no time for the elaborate, multi-faceted analysis. The book assigns to journalists the hard decisions on ethical questions such as whether to go undercover or otherwise misrepresent themselves in order to get a big story. The ethics chapter precedes the law chapters because ethical standards should underlie a journalist's work at all times. There may be occasions when ethics and law are not parallel, thus calling for the journalist to make a personal judgment. Law and Ethics for Today's Journalist is user-friendly, written in clear, direct, understandable language on issues that really matter to a working journalist. Supplementary reading of the actual court cases is recommended and links to most cases are provided in the text. The text includes a fine (but purposely not exhaustive) bibliography listing important and useful legal cases, including instructive appellate and trial court opinions, state as well as federal.

Media Law and Ethics is a comprehensive overview and a thoughtful introduction to media law principles and cases as well as related ethical concerns relevant to the practice of professional communication. This is the fi rst textbook to explicitly integrate both media law and ethics within one volume. Since it integrates both current law and ethical queries, it is ideal for both undergraduate and graduate courses in media law and ethics. Co-author Kyu Ho Youm expands this edition’s international scope, updating and broadening his chapter on international and foreign law. The book also covers the most timely and controversial issues in modern American media. The new fifth edition has been updated with current events and discusses the potential impact they have.

The third edition of Media Law and Ethics features a complete updating of all major U.S. Supreme Court cases and lower court decisions through 1998; more discussion throughout the book on media ethics and the role of ethics in media law; and an updated appendix that now features a copy of the U.S. Constitution, new sample copyright and trademark registration forms, and the current versions of major media codes of ethics, including the new code of the Society of Professional Journalists. Extensively updated and expanded chapters provide: *more detailed explanations of the legal system, the judicial process, and the relationship between media ethics and media law; *new cases in this developing area of the law that has attracted renewed attention from the U.S. Supreme Court; *the new Telecommunications Act and the Communications Decency Act; *a discussion of telecommunications and the Internet; *new developments in access to courts, records, and meetings such as recent court decisions and statutory changes; and *more information about trademark and trade secret laws and recent changes in copyright laws, as well as major court decisions on intellectual property. The book has also been updated to include new developments in obscenity and indecency laws, such as the Communications Decency Act, and the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Reno vs. ACLU. In addition, the instructor's manual includes a listing of electronic sources of information about media law, sample exams, and a sample syllabus.

This book makes the case for the news media to take the lead in combatting key threats to American society including racial injustice, economic disparity, and climate change by adopting an "ethics of care" in reporting practices. Examining how traditional news coverage of race, economics and climate change has been dedicated to straightforward facts, the author asserts that journalism should now respond to societal needs by adopting a moral philosophy of the "ethics of care," opening the door to empathetic yet factual and fair coverage of news events, with a goal to move public opinion to the point that politicians are persuaded to take effective action. The book charts a clear path for how this style of ethics can be applied by today’s journalists, tracing the emergence of this empathy-based ethics from feminist philosophy in the 1980s. It ultimately urges ethical news organizations to adopt the ethics of care, based on the human emotion prioritized by Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, and to pursue a more pro-active, solutions-seeking coverage of current events. This is an invaluable text for students and academics in the fields of journalism ethics, media ethics and media law, as well as for media professionals looking for a fresh perspective on practicing ethical journalism.

Providing practical and theoretical resources on media law and ethics for the United Kingdom and United States of America and referencing other legal jurisdictions such as France, Japan, India, China and Saudi Arabia, Comparative Media Law and Ethics is suitable for upper undergraduate and postgraduate study and for professionals in the media who need to work internationally. The book focuses on the law of the United Kingdom, the source of common law, which has dominated the English speaking world, and on the law of the USA, the most powerful cultural, economic, political and military power in the world. Media law and ethics have evolved differently in the US from the UK. This book investigates why this is the case. Throughout, media law and regulation is evaluated in terms of its social and cultural context.The book has a companion website at http://www.ma-radio.gold.ac.uk/cmle providing complementary resources and updated developments on the topics explored.

Published in conjunction with the International Bar Association, this high-profile collection of writings brings together judicial, legislative, regulatory, journalistic and academic perspectives on the current state of media laws in the UK and in the US, scrutinising their efficacy in relation to the rights for privacy and free expression.

This text charts a thoughtful path through increasingly complex ethical issues faced by today's journalism, advertising, and public relations practitioners.